long distance blues

How far is far? How long is long? How do you keep a relationship when miles of oceans separate the two of you? How do you keep the music playing? is what my friend James would ask, and the answer to that is as difficult as creating shortcuts to be with your loved one in just 5 minutes when in reality he is a continent away from you.

Surely there are ways. There is the old fashioned snail mail for example. Even Romeo and Juliet kept their love alive utilizing those, and look where they are now. There’s also the telephone. When Graham Bell thought of it, he must have had the long distance love affairs in mind. Others would include the e-mails, fax machines and the monumental cellular phones which were popularized more by their ability to send short messages known to us as “texting”.

But after the perfumed stationeries have been kept in a shoebox, the smoke of the telephone wires have cleared, the inbox messages on your e-mail have been deleted and the credit balance of your cell phone been reduced to zero, what happens next? Nothing. You still remain apart.

All these excuses for having a long distance relationship obviously miss the point. Receiving a typed “hug” cannot give you the warmth that a real hug from your loved one could provide and the word “mwuah!” on your phone’s LCD screen could not provide you with the tingling sensation a real kiss would normally evoke.

Now why am I writing this? It’s because I am in the same situation as all the crap I’ve mentioned above. What’s difficult is, this whole long distance thing is making me miserable and the only thing that could put me out of my misery is when we would finally be together, for keeps. But that would be far out in the future yet. Meanwhile, I’ll just have to content myself with his voice on the phone, with the e-mails he is sending and with the “hugs” and “mwuahs” I receive from him on my cell phone…